How a multi-national CPG brand clocked a 90-day time-to-value with Lytics and Google Cloud

Editor’s note: To kick off the new year and in preparation for NRF The Big Show, we invited partners from across our retail ecosystem to share stories, best practices, and tips and tricks on how they are helping retailers transform during a time that continues to see tremendous change. Please enjoy this entry from our partner.

Every brand aspires to unrivaled growth powered by passionate customers and dependable data. You’d be hard pressed to find a single CEO that claims they don’t want to be an industry or market leader. But when more growth, more brands, more regions, and more market share begin to result in unmanageable complexity, you end up with software bloat where, on average, an enterprise has 900+ applications — many of them legacy tools — only 28% of which integrate with a customer data platform (CDP) to capture, unify and activate customer data. That’s a lot of valuable information falling through the cracks.

As an enterprise business, when the data silos multiply or when data you’re collecting isn’t able to be acted on consistently, transformation happens — because it has to. 

This was the case for one enterprise leader, which after years of nearly-unrivaled success in the CPG space, turned to Google Cloud and Lytics, a next-generation Customer Data Platform designed to collect and unify customer data, extract actionable insight, and activate customer data to drive ROI. The brand sought to transform their data infrastructure and establish a global center of excellence to drive strategy across all their brands and regions. To do so, the brand wanted to launch a flexible CDP solution that would provide a unified, single view of the customer from which to personalize experiences and customize support — all with minimal, future development effort. But this investment wasn’t just about getting a CDP solution up and running. It was about making their CDP, and the power of their data, the catalyst for an organization-wide evolution toward true data- and customer-centricity.   

Transformation without compromise was the name of the game, and the CPG leader partnered with Lytics and Google Cloud to address three pervasive challenges enterprises face:

• Ensuring full visibility into engagement across all brand touchpoints, 

• Maintaining a sharp focus on customer retention and loyalty, 

• Scaling into new markets and areas of opportunity without a strain on development resources. 

This meant starting with breaking down the silos between brands, teams, and channels. But there were a few blockers in the way from the start.

The brand was utilizing multiple tools —including a cloud data warehouse, a content management system (CMS), a customer relationship management (CRM) system, and an email service provider (ESP)—  each of which included its own representation of a customer profile. The byproduct was that the marketing teams responsible for operating each of the tools were uncoordinated when delivering messages to their customers. 

This led to message overlap and the breaking of frequency caps, and was leaving both business and marketing users faced with a siloed, fragmented, and limited view of the consumer. That siloed view made it difficult, and often impractical, to customize support, create ad hoc analyses, personalize experiences or deliver an optimal consumer experience. 

In their largest region, they had built out a center of excellence that was already complex. This region of operation also represented its most comprehensive and disparate global example of data silos. This complexity was then compounded exponentially when we looked internationally.

Many multinational businesses have distinct setups supporting different brands per region including systems, processes, and data formats. But it’s typical that these pieces work together more seamlessly within each individual region, especially when it’s also the business’ most profitable region. Establishing a global center of excellence was necessary to align the brand’s teams, to allow its regional hubs to be more effective, and to adapt to and utilize each region’s unique patterns. 

Together, the CPG leader, Google Cloud, and Lytics designed a scalable infrastructure that could be deployed across all regions with minimal additional development work.

Embracing Lytics CDP with Google BigQuery quickly dismantled their long-standing scalability, data management, and personalization issues. Together, the solutions enabled:

1. More efficient use of and access to data between systems for simple platform scalability.

2. Never-before-seen control over the identification and movement of data that is essential to creating a unified/single view of the consumer ahead of the end of cookie.

3. Data cleansing, standardization, validation, and householding (including identity resolution) with Lytics Cloud Connect, a customer data infrastructure (CDI) solution.

4. Segmentation, analysis and activation (including dynamic personalization and lookalike modeling) with Lytics Decision Engine, a data activation tool. 

5. The ability to easily stitch unified data into rich profiles for a 360-degree customer view, to optimize targeting across channels, support the full customer journey in real time, and analyze results with a key focus on cross-selling to existing purchasers. 

Paired with BigQuery, Lytics unearthed the power of customer data with unified customer profiles, behavior and content affinities, predictive audiences, customer journey orchestration, and marketing optimization through AI and ML insights.

Of all the CDP solutions the brand considered, Lytics was the platform with the most comprehensive global UI language support; a vital capability for a growing, multinational enterprise with a reputation to uphold. 

In opting for a partnership with Lytics and Google Cloud, the brand built a global center of excellence around a strong core; a solution designed for scalability, high availability, data protection, security compliance, performance — and that allowed them to clock a 90-day time-to-value on their investment. 

We invite you to check out the Lytics CDP on the Google Cloud Marketplace.